The Event.

Well I would consider the event a success! Seeing the sense of pride within the attendees from the community and the firmness of their handshakes and hugs expressed such gratitude toward our work. Ms. Gayle hugged me twice and thanked me for all of the work put into the event, which was so rewarding. I loved being positioned at the door because I got to interact with people as they’d walked in and see their faces light up as they’d entered the venue, some because they knew what it looked like before and basked in its renewal or some just happy to see other members of the neighborhood. I heard several compliments throughout the day; some referencing how good the food tasted or smelled (Thank you Mrs. Wesolowski), how great the decorations were or how great the music was. I thought the tributes to Carol were wonderful and considered her speech thoughtful in that she thanked everyone else and recognized that she had not done everything alone. In interacting with her, she appeared quite modest which was refreshing (compared to her successor).

That (interesting) politician came, which I figured he would. I’d encountered him for the first time at the meeting that I, Reece and Joy had attended last Thursday. Poor guy, I suppose he wanted to badly to appeal to the community but talked himself silly in my opinion. He kept saying the wrong things, which made me want to eat more and more. Nonetheless, his presence was good I suppose.

I am very proud of us as a class, in working together to give back to this community. Missy also put so much work into it. Dr. King and your husband, thank you so much for all of your help as well!

Update.

As of this point, I feel as though our event is coming together nicely and our demographic group has a good understanding of the work that lies ahead. We have to document all of the findings from the census data from each decade for both Brooklyn and Curtis Bay. It is worth noting that in past years, Fairfield, Masonville and Hawkins Point show up at some points in the maps over the years and the tracts are broken up between them. Brooklyn was split up into different parts of Baltimore City according to our maps and sometimes appeared to be partly non-existent. Some of the keys that are displayed to help one identify the changes that have taken place in documentation from decade to decade are vague to the point that there is slight confusion but as a group, we are working to figure it out. We have each committed to a decade and will work on the remaining decades together. In terms of identifiable trends, we have seen shifts of racial and ethnic populations as the decades pass but need to collect all the data to note them completely. There is a lot of information within the books so we have realized that photocopying may work to our advantage. For employment, they documented very specific work including managerial positions, labor intensive and educational. Some years even had the ages of individuals broken down by year (i.e. 1 year old, 2 year old). In the 1980’s, there were more Irish people than Polish in Brooklyn. Curtis Bay on the other hand had large numbers of both.  I am interested to know exactly what created this shift in population. The way that the information was broken down began to show minorities but mainly Hispanic populations. They appear to be redundant in the displaying of the information as well. This coming week, we will be gathering the rest of the information together and looking for trends. So far there have been noticeable differences in population density for both cities between decades but we haven’t had the chance to compile complete listings.

In terms of our actual event, I feel as though we have great activities in store. As we piece together each piece, I get a bit more excited. The tickets, the t-shirt, the buttons..everything is coming together wonderfully. I dropped off our in-kind donation letter to the Wal Mart located in Landsdowne and hope to follow up with them this week. When I’d visited the Rita’s in Arbutus said that they do charitable donations but I would have to contact them when the owner is around which really depends on his schedule so I am going to try back on the times that they listed him as being available. 

Our visit to the school was wonderful, and I had the chance to talk to some of the children about their paintings as well as their school and home experiences. There were several sibling sets that I’d met. The environment was so positive and the children were so eager to engage in conversation with us. I hope that they are able to attend the event.

As the event approaches...

I feel a bit more confident about the event. I am excited that we are getting the home-cooked food added to the menu because I am also an advocate for its ability to bring people together. When we think about cookouts, they are usually hosted in backyards or other family based events so I feel as though we will attach that attitude to our event.

Our demographic work is still a work in progress so we will have more to report on that in a few days.

In terms of getting the word out, I have posted a few flyers in the American Studies hallway and talked about it in a few AMST classes but plan on tackling them all as the event approaches..as in next week or the week after. I just want to compile a list of what I will say as well as the benefits to attending our event to generate a buzz, sell t-shirts and tickets. I am excited all in all!

Demographics

I finally feel useful! The demographics portion of our experience seems to be tedious but very interesting to say the least. When visiting the basement of the library, I came across so many different categorizations of race and ethnicity adopted by our country for classification issues that I had previously known of, but just felt differently seeing it in front of me for the first time. I knew that actually interacting with these documents for the purpose of this class would be just as interesting; I may even get a bit aggravated.

The trends that we have noticed thus far were expected. The categorizations of what constituted minority groups shifted over time but nonetheless, kept Caucasians in larger numbers. We are still working on documenting information from each decade starting with 1940 so I believe that I will have more to say on the matter and our findings come the end of the week.

At This Point

In terms of generating attention, I want to hand out flyers on UMBC’s campus to ensure that students are informed about our event. I would also want to involve the UMBC webpage as well as the myumbc ticker. I would also want to take advantage of the open spaces on campus such as academic row where the Chick Fil A and Starbucks are in terms of advertising on campus either by posting ourselves there and creating a scene (with maybe music and flyers), the space in front of the library and also the Erickson field area. Advertising in the Commons would work to our benefit as well. For the donations of food from local vendors, I would prefer for us to go to the community beforehand and get acquainted with residents. This would allow us to familiarize ourselves with possible resources and people. The establishments that Rachel and I were able to visit had generally inviting atmospheres and the people appeared to be positively responsive to our presence with greetings and their overall demeanors.  At this point I still feel a bit detached from the event only because I feel that it is split down the middle with Art and History and with my expertise not necessarily residing within each of the two. But I do believe that I can still be valuable and contribute to either one. My grouping is now within the Art sector and I feel that our groups are wonderfully engaged and will incorporate each and everyone of us effectively. I see so much fun ahead of us!

1970 to 1980 and Demographics.

For my decade of 1970-1980, I was able to find a few articles in the archives of the Baltimore Sun. My findings for included obituaries, political campaign activity, industrial testing, a memorial pieces, demographic concern, and wedding announcements. The industrial testing articles spoke about the pollution in bodies of water that affected the water supply that was distributed to the neighboring communities. The memorial pieces consisted of a dedication to a retired Baltimore City policeman who had died of a heart attack and a member of the National Guard. The article on demographic concern referenced population movements between Baltimore City and Baltimore County, speaking of possible causes. The wedding announcements talked about brides to be and the tie to Brooklyn and Curtis Bay was that their families were from those areas.

The more recent publications referenced the movie filming of “XXX:State of the Union” which came to Baltimore City , political activity amongst communities and government officials and political activists’ working on facilitating community relations. The article about the movie spoke about how part of the city had to be shut down to accommodate filming and the article about community relationships spoke about the Chemical Industry Council of Maryland placing billboards throughout the city to "improve community outreach".

In relation to demographics and census data, I was able to find listings for both Brooklyn and Curtis Bay. Each chart contained valuable data with reference to population, ethnicity, income, age and all other viable pieces of information. I have both pdf’s printed out for reference.

Source for Demographics:

“Baltimore City NSA Demographic Profiles” Census 2000 data.

 <http://censusprofile.bnia.org/>

Rachel and I Visit The Community.

In terms of public relations and advertising, it appears as though there are several avenues available to our disposal within the community. The most viable, preliminarily in my opinion would be the bars. These appear to be attractive locations for getting the word out there. It is possible that the patrons within these establishments routinely visit and would easily see whatever advertisements we were to leave there on display.

Another thing that we noticed was that the people that we ran into appeared friendly.   This was a positive and led us to believe that we would not run into as many roadblocks as we had anticipated. Related to roadblocks though, we’d noticed that a few places were shut down or may have modified store hours, which were not on display for us to see, so we can only infer that they were not operating.

We were able to visit five establishments, two of them giving us their menus for us to contact them: Shirley’s Sunny Side Restaurant and Ultimate Pizza and Wings. After visiting the places that we were able to and generally scoping out the landscape, we decided the best way to interact with the community members to give them a feel for who we are and what we are about would be to go as a bigger group later in the day to visit these bars. It would be a great opportunity to interact with them in a laid back setting to meet common ground.